The Mouse Machine: Disney and Technology - Softcover

Telotte, J P.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0252075404 ISBN 13: 9780252075407

Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 2008

Synopsis

Throughout Disney's phenomenally successful run in the entertainment industry, the company has negotiated the use of cutting-edge film and media technologies that, J. P. Telotte argues, have proven fundamental to the company's identity. Disney's technological developments include the use of stereophonic surround sound for Fantasia, experimentation with wide-screen technology, inaugural adoption of three-strip Technicolor film, and early efforts at fostering depth in the animated image. Telotte also chronicles Disney's partnership with television, development of the theme park, and depiction of technology in science-fiction narratives. An in-depth discussion of Disney's shift into digital filmmaking with its Pixar partnership and an emphasis on digital special effects in live-action films, such as the Pirates of the Caribbean series, also highlight the studio's historical investment in technology. By exploring the technological context for Disney creations throughout its history, The Mouse Machine illuminates Disney's extraordinary growth into one of the largest and most influential media and entertainment companies in the world.

Hardbook is unjacketed.

About this title

About the Author

J. P. Telotte is a professor of film and media studies at Georgia Institute of Technology. He is coeditor of the journal Post Script and author of many books on film and media, including Disney TV, Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir, and The Essential Science Fiction Television Reader.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Mouse Machine

DISNEY AND TECHNOLOGYBy J. P. TELOTTE

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Copyright © 2008 J. P. Telotte
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-07540-7

Contents

Acknowledgments.....................................................................viiIntroduction: Main Street, Machines, and the Mouse..................................11. Sound Fantasy....................................................................232. Minor Hazards: Disney and the Color Adventure....................................423. Three-Dimensional Animation and the Illusion of Life.............................564. A Monstrous Vision: Disney, Science Fiction, and CinemaScope.....................815. Disney in Television Land........................................................966. The "Inhabitable Text" of the Parks..............................................1177. Course Correction: Of Black Holes and Computer Games.............................1418. "Better Than Real": Digital Disney, Pixar, and Beyond............................159Conclusion..........................................................................179Notes...............................................................................191Works Cited.........................................................................203Index...............................................................................211

Introduction

Main Street, Machines, and the Mouse

I

Disney's gift, from the beginning, was not as is commonly supposed a "genius" for artistic expression ... it was for the exploitation of technological innovation. -Richard Schickel, The Disney Version

In the Disney theme parks, appearance is everything. The company's insistence on accurate research and detailed reproduction is well known, and the Disney Main Street, while what Stephen Fjellman has described as "a romanticized, idealized, architecturally controlled" creation (170), supposedly modeled on the downtown of Marceline, Missouri, where Walt Disney spent his formative years, quickly affirms the corporate emphasis on detail. The parks are also notoriously clean. Attendants-or "cast members," as employees are all termed-constantly walk the streets and pathways, picking up trash, wiping and polishing, watering the decorative flowers and shrubs, and generally making sure that there is little to mar the planned illusions. In addition, perspective is carefully controlled, so that guests see things-and are encouraged to take photographs-from calculated vantages, ones that afford the most picturesque views and that avoid glimpses of all that is "backstage." As a consequence, much of what allows for those attractive appearances, what makes the parks work, is never seen. For example, just underneath Main Street (and the other streets in the Magic Kingdom, as well as part of Epcot) snakes an elaborate complex of passageways, or "utilidors," as Disney terms them, providing quick access to all areas of the parks and holding the water, gas, and compressed air pipes, electrical wiring, computer cables, heating and air-conditioning ducts, and so on, that make these immense structures function so efficiently and entertainingly. The appearances here are, in fact, designed not only to provide guests with a pleasurable experience, but also to obscure the fact that these parks are not fantasy worlds but great technological wonders, with their creation and propagation reminding us of how accurately Richard Schickel estimated Walt Disney's true genius.

By remaining largely invisible, those technological underpinnings are supposed to make the parks seem to work by magic, thereby adding to the "magical" atmosphere that Disney sells-as a vacation destination, a purveyor of television and radio programs, a retail sales source, and a film studio, among other things. Of course, at times the appearances do fail. Rides inevitably break down; cast members, playing one of the Disney characters in a full body costume, have been known to faint; in 2006, a forty-nine-year-old tourist died of heart failure after riding Epcot's "Mission: SPACE" attraction. And when doing so can contribute to the company's profitability, Disney itself does lift the curtain and let us glimpse the mechanisms at work. Visitors to the Magic Kingdom, for example, after paying the usual park admission, can also take the rather pricey "Keys to the Kingdom" tour, a four-to-five-hour guided exploration of the utilidors, the waste treatment plant, parade staging area, and various other logistical and operational components unseen by the usual park visitor. Other Disney parks have also added versions of this behind-the-scenes experience, such as Epcot's "Behind the Seeds" tour of the high-tech food and plant cultivation that supports the park and its restaurants, or Animal Kingdom's "Wild by Design" excursion that shows how the park operates and cares for its animal inhabitants. As Disney has learned, revealing how the "magic" works can prove a rewarding experience for visitors, as well as a lucrative extension of the company's larger synergistic strategy; in fact, such revelation provides further evidence of Disney's status as what Janet Wasko terms "the most synergistic of the Hollywood majors" (Hollywood 53).

The aim of this book is to follow the company's lead in this regard, to offer a selective look at some of those often-unseen-or unconsidered-technological supports or developments that, in film, television, and the theme parks, have been crucial to the success of the Walt Disney Company and, at times, also a clue to its limitations. The result, I hope, is a very different, if admittedly limited kind of studio history, one in which we focus on both the manner and the implications of the company's investment in technology and technological culture. Certainly, wherever we look at the company that bears the name of one of its founders-and throughout this study we shall use the Disney name mainly to designate the company, but at times also its original driving force, Walt Disney-we see the traces of both this technological development and a technological attitude that have become almost as fundamental to the company's identity as its trademark cartoon characters: Mickey and Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy, and the rest. Yet those seemingly real figures and the fantasy realm they inhabit often, and even purposely, distract us from the technology that, as in the theme parks, operates just below the surface, making possible the various fantasies the company sells. By exploring the technological context for the various Disney creations, the literal foundation of the many Disney worlds, we can better understand not only Disney's phenomenal development from a small Poverty Row film studio to one of the largest and most influential media and entertainment companies in the world, but also its powerful appeal to a contemporary worldwide audience, an audience that seems increasingly aware that it inhabits a thoroughly technological, mediated environment-one to which Disney lends a most inviting and even seductive countenance.

This technological perspective should also shed some light on Disney's role within that contemporary media environment. For even as it has branched out from its early primary function as a small cartoon studio to become a key presence in television, radio, the Internet, book and music publishing, theme parks, theater, and the more amorphous leisure industry, the studio has retained something of its original character, a kind of technological fingerprint that attests to Schickel's assessment. Today Disney functions as an important part of what the cultural philosopher Paul Virilio has termed "the vision machine" (Vision 59), as a segment of that contemporary technological culture that conditions how we see-and inhabit-our world. Esther Leslie has observed how early discussions of the cinema frequently anticipated this impact, describing the ways in which film "obliges the viewer to see the world" in particular ways-in terms of tracking shots, master shots, close-ups, a montage of juxtaposed images, and so on (105). A wide array of subsequent analyses has tied that conventionalizing of vision to film's powerful ideological impact. But more than simply pointing towards such ideological manipulations, Virilio's development of this notion emphasizes two points that are typically overlooked. One is a kind of totalitarian force that pervades the contemporary cultural environment, a force that he a bit exaggeratedly terms "a eugenics of sight," but one that might more accurately be described as a tendency towards a "standardization of ways of seeing" (Vision 12, 13), an inclination to control how we see. As initially noted, some of this standardization is crucial to the Disney theme park experience, which carefully organizes and controls its guests' point of view. As Alexander Wilson notes about the Epcot experience, "There is never a moment or space that is not visually, aurally, and olfactorily programmed" (122) there. But that very tendency for programming and control, this fundamental character of modern technological culture in general, also charges the entertainment experience with a kind of challenge. And here is Virilio's second key point: that the workings of such a cultural force implicate us, across cultures and classes, in an ongoing struggle, in our own sort of negotiation, "not in an effort to destroy it, but in order to transfigure" that environment by rendering its effects quite transparent and thus less controlling or pernicious (Armitage 157), as we negotiate between our desire for entertainment and our mindfulness of the ideological baggage often hidden in that experience.

In fact, Janet Wasko, Mark Phillips, and Eileen Meehan have already situated the contemporary work of Disney in one version of this struggle. Approaching the company as a conglomeration of globally focused entertainment technologies, they describe how various audiences have developed different strategies for addressing and coping with Disney's efforts at "standardization," and the often "dazzling" effect of those efforts on worldwide audiences. As they observe, some audiences readily recognize the manipulative and even exploitative effects found in Disney films, television programs, comic books, and other products, and resist those effects-although ironically, as Phillips notes, that resistance usually "does not stop them from liking the products produced by the company" (48). Others acknowledge some of those effects but are able "to compartmentalize Disney the business from Disney as entertainment," and to distinguish "between 'classic' Disney and current Disney" (Phillips 48), that is, between a historical set of texts, linked to Walt Disney, to which they are more kindly disposed and those elements, produced by the more recent company regimes, that immediately affect their lives and seem to emphasize a consumerist ethic. Yet another audience segment, as they offer, adopts a strategy of appropriation, incorporating the Disney experience into family or cultural rituals, thereby translating Disney from something "uniquely American" to something perceived as "mine" (Phillips 55). Thus in her study of Disney audiences in Denmark, Kirsten Drotner observes how they "form and sustain their own cultural identities" by defining "what they see as being Danish through a process of contrastive validation to what they perceive as being American" in the Disney texts (113). Through these various strategies we can begin to see the complexity of response that the technological world, and Disney as a powerful component of that world, not only elicits but almost requires of audiences throughout the world.

While the technological perspective outlined in Virilio's work has at times been charged with overlooking just such cultural strategies in favor of more formal phenomenological concerns, I would suggest that Virilio's emphasis on a sense of struggle or "wrestling with" the technological (Armitage 10, 157) links his vantage in an important way to analyses like those described above. For it points to the broader nature of this technological contention, implicating both the audience and the companies that employ it in a nexus of negotiations, and suggesting that both must similarly bargain with all that constitutes our technological climate. Since commentary on the studio has, over the last two decades, been dominated by rather strict ideological assessments that emphasize reception, treat Disney like a monolithic agent, and largely exempt technology from the equation, Virilio's perspective seems a valuable vantage to bring to such a powerful component of the media environment. Thus, a primary aim of this study is to open a broader perspective on Disney by examining the company's technological workings-i.e., both its attitudes towards technology and its efforts at relating technology to a mass audience-and hopefully rendering them far more transparent.

It is also in the context of this imperative to deal with the power of technology and the nature of modern technological culture that I see Disney playing a crucial and in some ways instructive role, one that can help to explain some of its great attraction, even for those who, as Phillips points out, generally resist the studio's work, or as Drotner suggests, approach it with a sense of "ironic enjoyment" (113). For as we shall see, throughout its history, Disney has constantly been engaged in what we shall metaphorically describe as "negotiations" with various components of the vision machine. Like most companies in the entertainment industry, Disney has, in order to survive in an increasingly competitive environment, repeatedly had to innovate or adopt new technologies or move into new media forms, and in some cases to innovate and then abandon new technologies that proved unprofitable or problematic. The development of sound cartoons and the corporate partnership with television are two obvious examples of the former path, with sound allowing the studio to differentiate its product from most other early cartoon makers, and television creating a new source of revenue and advertising, as well as an outlet for its product in a powerful emerging medium in the 1950s. As instances of the latter situation, we might recall Disney's development of stereophonic surround sound for Fantasia (1940) and its rather quick abandonment of that technology after its costly road-show failure, as well as the studio's move away from hybrid animation in the late 1940s after both audiences and critics responded coolly to this development. Moreover, the studio's various productions-texts that cut across all aspects of our media environment-have provided audiences with numerous sites wherein they can both observe and vicariously participate in these most important negotiations. In them we repeatedly encounter dramatized examples of how we might deal with the difficulties of this world, situations Disney has carefully measured and worked out for us, as in the case of Monsters, Inc.'s solution to the energy crisis-the substitution of laughter for screams as an infinitely renewable energy source, and analogously, the need for optimism rather than fear in addressing the obvious problems posed by limited natural resources.

Before further considering these various technological encounters, though, we should pause a moment to clarify how we might use that term technology, since today it often means different things to different people. For many the term simply denotes a category of mechanical or electrical tools or devices, specific things, while others, particularly in the area of cultural studies, liberally deploy it to describe a set of practices commonly centering on how we manipulate our world. I want to stake out a kind of middle ground between these extremes, using technology to suggest something more than what Neil Postman limits it to, that is, "merely a machine" (Amusing 84), but also something less than what Andrew Ross, in an example of the excesses of cultural studies, far too ambiguously defines as a "cultural process ... that only makes sense in the context of familiar kinds of behavior" (3). In between is an area that includes both hardware and software, or perhaps more precisely, specific mechanical constructs like the multiplane camera, media such as television, and even a scientific mindset that construes and constructs the world according to technological principles, such as regularity, efficiency, and speed. To consider only hardware or technical extensions of the body would obviously exclude most cultural considerations, while to go completely in the direction that Ross suggests, to see practically all human behavior as a form of technology, ultimately renders the term almost meaningless. That approach creates an identity between technology and culture because it wants to emphasize human or social agency, but that perspective risks forgetting a point that has often been made: that many apparatuses, even mechanical and electronic devices, are far from neutral. Ultimately, I want to suggest a more complex and, I hope, more useful relationship than either of those extremes usually permits.

Certainly, as we shall use it here, technology does implicate a variety of specific tools or devices that have proved crucial to the development of the Disney empire. Yet those devices are invariably tied to a certain technical mindset or context, what some might broadly describe as a cultural discourse, that has helped propel Disney's development. While the specific tools of sound technology, such as Vitaphone's sound-on-disk, Movietone's sound-on-film, or the RCA Photophone system were essential to transforming the film industry in the late 1920s, a larger discourse-i.e., both popular and scientific-about sound and about how it could affect both film production and the film experience was also crucial. So as the following chapters, in order, chronicle Disney's innovation of sound cartoons, its application of three-strip color, its efforts at giving depth to the animated image, its partnership with television, its experimentation with widescreen technology, its development of the theme park and Audio-Animatronics, and its movement into digital animation and effects filmmaking, they will also invoke a broader technological discourse or attitude, such as that involved in the space race of the 1950s and 1960s, that surrounding issues of digital representation much later, or, in several chapters, that central to the increasing popularity of the genre of science fiction. The result, I hope, is a situating of technology in what might broadly be termed a technological context, and an avoidance of the extremes that often characterize many discussions of the subject.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Mouse Machineby J. P. TELOTTE Copyright © 2008 by J. P. Telotte. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0252075404
• ISBN 13: 9780252075407
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 232